New mine safety legislation requiring the installation of wireless, two-way communication and electronic tracking systems in U.S. coal mines is creating an unprecedented opportunity for Ontario mining suppliers.

A consequence of the Sago mine disaster, the new safety requirements will produce a blizzard of purchase orders over the next few years.

The January 2, 2006 tragedy took the lives of 12 West Virginia coal miners trapped underground as a result of an explosion. Rescuers took 41 hours to reach the men, but found only one miner alive. The rest died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Radio communication and leaky feeder systems are commonplace in Canada’s hard rock mining industry, but much less so in the U.S., so Ontario is where communication system suppliers have congregated.

West Virginia’s 170 coal mines were required to submit plans to the Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training by July 31 detailing how and when they intend to acquire communication and tracking systems.

The federal government’s Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act will require an estimated 430 additional underground coal mines across the U.S. to follow suit by June 15, 2009.

Randall Harris, an engineering advisor to the director of the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training, oversees the certification of the required communication systems and has been working with Ontario-based suppliers to ensure compliance with the legislation.

“Our goal is to start approving installation plans by September and start ordering equipment,” he said.
Among the companies well-positioned to win a share of the business are Varis Mine Technology, Mine Radio Systems and Mine Site Technologies.

Sudbury-based Varis has been aggressively targeting the U.S. market for several years and claims to have sold a total of 60 systems across the country.

“The steps we took in 2003 and 2004 to get MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration) approval have really paid off,” said managing director Matt Ward. “Having done that work in advance of just about everyone else, we’re in a perfect position to take advantage of the opportunity.”

Bob Lavergne, a Sudbury-based technical sales manager for Mine Radio Systems, has been spending so much time in West Virginia that he jokes about checking out the real estate market for a second home.

Quotations

“”We haven’t sold anything yet, but we’ve done a lot of quotations and we’re definitely a preferred supplier for a lot of mines,” he said. “We’re not only quoting systems, but also assisting them in writing up their plans for the state.”

Also vying for business is Australia-based Mine Site Technlogies, which serves the Canadian market from an office in Sudbury.

There are several different kinds of communication systems being proposed, but leaky feeder technology will probably emerge as the most popular solution.

Node-based, WiFi systems will appeal to mines that want to use their communication systems to transmit video and data in addition to voice, but the physical characteristics of Appalachian coal mines could make this a much more expensive way to go, said Harris.

“Because of the folding in the Appalachian ranges, the coal seams are very seldom flat, and when you look at the communication frequencies you have for WiFi, it’s pretty much line of sight.

“That’s real problematic because you’re looking at repeaters or nodes every 600 to 1,000 feet. If you’re talking about a mine where the working face is 25,000 feet from the portal, you’ve got a lot of devices and each one of those devices has to be intrinsically safe. That drives up the cost considerably.”

If the WiFi system components are not intrinsically safe on their own, they have to be housed in explosion-proof boxes, each of which can cost between $1,000 and $3,000, said Harris.

“With leaky feeder systems, there’s an amplifier every 1,500 to 1,800 feet and one power center every 6,000 to 8,000 feet, so even if they have to put them in explosion-proof boxes, there aren’t that many of them.”

Leaky feeder will be less expensive, but “you do lose some capabilities,” said Harris. In the end, it will be up to each mine to decide if the extra capability is worth the higher price tag.

Ward agrees that leaky feeder will emerge as the preferred choice.

“Fiber is great, but you can’t radiate off fiber. It’s point to point. You need a fiber-to-radio interface every 200 metres. Leaky feeder has been around a long time. The reason it’s successful is it’s simple and it works. It’s easy to install and maintain and it does what it says it does. It provides easy to use, push to talk communications throughout a mine with no dead spots.”

Costs

West Virginia mines will also incur considerable costs acquiring mobile emergency shelters, additional supplies of self-contained self-rescuers and lifelines (ropes with cone-shaped devices along the walls to guide miners in the direction of the portal when smoke fills the mine).

So they’re looking for a reasonably priced solution that will comply with the legislation, said Lavergne.

“Leaky feeder has a track record and a history behind it, so it’s definitely the preferred technology. Not that there’s anything wrong with fiber. It’s just new to the industry and the coal mines are saying ‘We want something that’s proven.’”

Both Mine Radio Systems and Varis also have hybrid Ethernet over Leaky Feeder (EoLF) systems that allow mines to take advantage of high-speed data, voice and video applications underground over a leaky feeder backbone.

The lack of MSHA approval may disqualify some emerging technologies in West Virginia because of the state’s decision to fast track deployment. However, longer lead times for the rest of the country’s mines may give suppliers the time they need to satisfy federal government standards for intrinsic safety and make a more convincing case for high bandwidth, fiber-based networking technologies.

Mine Site Technologies’ ImPact technology suite, a fiber-based solution developed and manufactured in Sudbury for the global market, is a case in point. Enabling video, on-board vehicle diagnostics, mobile data communications, production monitoring and all of the other applications that are taken for granted on surface, the technology promises to “meet the communication infrastructure and application requirements of mines in the 21st century.”

Tracking

While wireless two-way voice communication is the norm in Canada, tracking technology is just beginning to catch on. Mine Site Technologies has a tracking system installed at CVRD-Inco’s McCreedy East Mine and Varis beta tested its SmartTag system at Xstrata Nickel’s Craig Mine, but in both cases, the technology was used to track equipment, not miners.

Communication system suppliers moving into the personnel and asset tracking space are beginning to make some headway in other markets.

Mine Site Technologies staff in Sudbury, for example, just completed the installation of a personnel and asset tracking system at a salt mine in upstate New York and the company is commissioning another system at a hard rock mine in Nevada, said Will Gove, general manager for Canada.

Mine Radio Systems has also had some success, winning orders for several personnel tracking systems for coal mines in Poland.

“Tracking can be done over leaky feeder, but it’s more difficult in our view,” said Gove.

“Straight leaky feeder companies would tell you otherwise. We do both, but if a client asked us to do tracking, we’d do it over an Ethernet WiFi network.”

Receivers attached to the leaky feeder or fiber network throughout the mine read RFID tags installed in a miner’s cap lamp and transit the data to a computer monitor on surface, allowing emergency personnel to pinpoint the location of miners underground in the event of an emergency.

Several other technologies, including proximity, or signal strength tracking, and inertial tracking, are also being developed, but most mines are expected to go with RFID systems.

Suppliers more familiar with Canada’s hard rock mining industry are in for a surprise when they have to start installing their leaky feeder or fiber systems, said Lavergne.

“We’re talking about mines that have a height of 36 inches. You’re basically lying on your back on what looks like a kid’s go-cart. We’re used to standing up and walking around or working on a scissor lift to install our equipment.”

There is no specific deadline for the installation of the required communication systems in West Virginia. The state’s Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training is working with its federal counterpart, MSHA, to accelerate the certification of supplier components as intrinsically safe and is reviewing mine plans.

“Our goal is to get everything installed as quickly as possible, but we recognize that supply is constrained for some of these components, so we want to make sure that we understand all that and that we don’t put companies in a position to meet a deadline they just can’t meet,” said Harris.

Whether suppliers will be able to cope with the deluge of business is still to be seen. Some are convinced that the deadlines can’t be met.

For now, suppliers are focusing most of their efforts on West Virginia, said Lavergne. “The rest of the U.S. is sitting back and waiting to see what’s going to happen, who the manufacturers are going to be and how well the systems work.”

The tangle of wires and cables snaking through underground mines will soon be a thing of the past, according to Will Gove, Mine Site Technologies’ general manager for Canada.

“There’s a new wave starting to move through the mining industry with respect to communications technology,” said Gove, who heads up the Australian company’s Canadian office in Sudbury.

Separate systems for voice communications, central blasting, equipment and personnel tracking, seismic monitoring and ventilation control will inevitably give way to convergence of all of this infrastructure onto a common wireless network, he predicts.

“A lot of mining companies are moving away from traditional leaky feeder technology, which is now 20 to 25 years old. It’s still a fantastic technology, but there are a number of mines that are looking to move to wireless networking technology.”

One of the main drivers for the move to wireless networking is the opportunity to collect data relating to mine production.

“Traditionally, data collection in the mining industry has been a very manual process,” said Gove. “You fill in a piece of paper, take the piece of paper to surface at the end of the shift and transfer it into a computer. Wireless networking allows that to happen automatically.”

With accurate, real time data at their fingertips, mine managers will have a better understanding of their operation and make better decisions, said Gove.

“The problem with an underground mine is that you have a bunch of assets being deployed underground and you don’t really know what they do. They literally disappear into a dark hole. It’s not like you can stand over a production line and see things happening with your own eyes.

Data

“A mine manager relies on data to make business decisions. This technology brings data to the foreground and centralizes it,” he said.

For example, sensors installed on load-haul-dump vehicles or haul trucks can wirelessly transmit how many tonnes of ore are being transported to the loading pocket.

Wireless networks can also accommodate Voice over IP (VoIP) technology, replacing traditional two-way radios and leaky feeder cabling. VoIP allows miners underground to make and receive calls over the public phone system and hold private conversations, but its adoption has been held back in part by the lack of a ruggedized handset, he said.

“VoIP handsets are sold by the thousands to the medical and healthcare industry and for use in warehousing and logistics, but they’re not mine-hardened. There’s also a cultural challenge because miners are familiar with two-way radio technology and a lot of them like it.”

Mine Site Technologies has supplied a wireless network and VoIP communications to Rio Tinto’s Diavik Diamond Mine in the Northwest Territories “and they’re quite happy with it,” he said. In fact, according to Gove, Rio Tinto is currently evaluating its communication requirements and considering the deployment of wireless networks in their mines worldwide.”
Voice communications would just be one of several applications because “once you put in a wireless network, you can pretty much do anything you want with it.”

Mecca of mining

Mine Site Technologies opened its office in Sudbury in 2004 to service and support the Canadian mining market. The company currently has eight employees in Canada and a second, smaller office in Edmonton. “The Sudbury Basin has one of the highest concentrations of mining activity anywhere in the world, so this is the Mecca of mining and a good place to do business,” said Gove, an Australian ex-pat who was transferred to Canada by Atlas Copco 10 years ago and recruited by Mine Site Technologies last year to manage its Canadian operations.

Based in Sydney with three branch offices across Australia, Mine Site Technologies handles sales elsewhere in the world through distributors. Founded in 1989, the company literally made waves in the mining industry by commercializing its innovative Personal Emergency Device, or PED system, an ultra low frequency “through-the-earth communication technology.

In an emergency situation, text messages communicating escape routes or details about the emergency can be transmitted through 800 to 1,000 metres of rock to receiving units installed on mobile equipment or integrated into a miner’s cap lamp battery. The system can also be used for centralized blasting or to control ventilation fans and pumps.

“The greatest benefit of through-the-earth technology is that there is virtually no infrastructure,” said Gove. “You’re using the rock as the transmission medium. All the other technologies continually need to be extended to keep up with the development of the mine. The other advantage is that in the event of seismic activity, there’s no infrastructure to be damaged.”

The disadvantage of through-the-earth technology, however, is that communication is only one-way.

The system is currently used in more than 150 mines around the world.
Mine Site Technologies also supplies cap lamp systems integrated with two-way radios and RFID tags, tracking technology for mobile equipment and personnel, and leaky feeder systems.